The present invention relates to communications equipment, and, more particularly, to telephony.
It could be argued that the Internet is the fastest growing network in the United States and around the world. Indeed, in the last couple of years use of the Internet has been extending to multimedia communications.
In this regard, current "Internet technology" supports real-time audio communications from one person to another person over the Internet. Typically, this requires at least one of these people to have a personal computer with special hardware and software. For example, International Discount Telephone (IDT), a New Jersey based company, provides a service that enables a personal computer user in one country to call a person with an ordinary telephone in another country over the Internet for a small fraction of the cost charged for calls over the traditional public-switched-telephone-network. In this service, the long distance portion of the call uses an Internet connection between the personal computer user and an IDT "access platform," which is associated with a particular Internet Protocol address in the area of the called telephone number. This access platform is typically a high-performance computer (also known in the art as a "server"). The IDT access platform completes the telephone call to the called party via a plain-old-telephone-service call. Once established, real-time audio communications across the Internet typically uses compressed audio packets since the Internet is a packet-switched communications network. In the IDT approach only the calling party is required to have a personal computer with associated hardware and software that supports multimedia communications over the Internet.
The significant cost reduction with the use of the Internet for long distance telephone communications comes at the expense of lowered quality and reliability. However, this trade-off is acceptable to many users, particularly for overseas callers, who pay very high per minute charges (compared to domestic charges). As the technology advances and the Internet bandwidth capacity increases, it is expected that the quality and reliability of such a Internet-based telephone call should improve.